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Christmas Quotes

Most of the quotes on this page are not about Christmas at all. We built it from the pages on family, love and gratitude, which is what people tend to want for a card or a toast.

That makes it a long list, ordered by quality rather than by how seasonal each entry feels. If you want something that sounds like Christmas, search for it. If you want something that would be true at any family table, start here.

Random quote on Christmas

Most quoted on christmas:

He loved her so passionately he wanted her to be one soul and one body with him; and he was conscious that here, with those deep roots attaching her to the native life, she would always keep something from him.

W. Somerset Maugham

I find a rapture linked with each despair,
Well worth the price of anguish. I detect
More good than evil in humanity.
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes,
And men grow better as the world grows old.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox Poems of Pleasure (1900)

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

Pythagoras

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge —
That myth is more potent than history. … And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Robert Fulghum

Bid me to live, and I will live
Thy Protestant to be,
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.
A heart as soft, a heart as kind,
A heart as sound and free
As in the whole world thou canst find,
That heart I'll give to thee.

Robert Herrick Hesperides (1648)

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.

William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (1798)

We are not the same persons this year as last ; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

W. Somerset Maugham The Summing Up (1938)

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

Kurt Vonnegut Slapstick (1976)

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.

Rollo May Love and Will (1969)

All love - love of children, love of parents, love of God or life - comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.

Barry Long The Way In (2000)

Human love is not love. Love is natural to every body but it becomes human love as the person learns from society to confuse love with sex.

Barry Long The Way In (2000)

How can I tell the signals and the signs
By which one heart another heart divines?
How can I tell the many thousand ways
By which it keeps the secret it betrays?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love?

Alexander Pope Eloisa to Abelard (1717)

Oh fair, oh sweet and holy as dew at morning tide,
I gaze on thee, and yearnings, sad in my bosom hide.

Heinrich Heine

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string?
I am shamed through all my nature to have lov'd so slight a thing.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

Anatole France The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

Oh love entertained in stars and doves,/how like a joyous spray you cross my soul!

Julia de Burgos Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1982)

For, you see, each day I love you more,
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Rosemonde Gérard

To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you, to be the idol of your idol! ... It is too much, it exceeds human happiness, it is stealing fire from heaven!

Delphine de Girardin La Croix de Berny (1855)

And in that first flame
Is all the nectar of the kiss.

Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

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